Your non-physician practitioners (NPPs) aren’t eligible to collect the $18,000 first-round electronic health record (EHR) incentive payment, but they can help your physicians get that cash by boosting workflow and assisting with meaningful use measures.

“NPPs help with many of the list-based measures, they help with managing patients and they help fill the gap … when physicians are learning EHR and getting used to that workflow,” says Christopher Tashjian, MD, a family practitioner in Ellsworth, Wis., who has already earned the federal incentive money.

Using your physician assistants (PA) to assist in surgeries can free up your doctor’s time, but can also be a big reason for claims denials with surgical modifiers. Medicare claims data showed that PAs had a 16% denial rate for using both modifier 78 (return to or for related procedure, post op, same physician) and modifier AS (assistant in surgery) in 2009 and experts don’t believe that is a coincidence.

These charts examine E/M code level selection by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) based on the two biggest place of service (POS) settings. NOTE: The percentage values in parentheses above the bars indicate what share that particular code level had out of all E/Ms billed by NPs or PAs. Because the bars were graphed based on utilization by volume, the percentages don’t always match (e.g. for level 3 E/Ms in the office setting, the NP bar is higher despite the percentage being lower). NOTE: Code levels reflect a combination of new and established patient visits on the office side and a combination of observation and hospital care on the inpatient side. Graphs derived from the latest 2009 CMS claims data.

Don’t be lulled into complacency by the 2013 deadline for CMS’s latest revalidation initiative. You will have only 60 days to submit a complete revalidation to your Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC), starting the day you receive a revalidation notice – regardless of the fact that March 23, 2013 is the ultimate deadline. Miss the 60-day deadline and your Medicare billing privileges could be suspended, according to CMS.

You will have many more reasons to switch from paper enrollment forms to CMS’s web-based Provider Enrollment Chain Ownership System (PECOS) in 2012, Part B News has learned. Currently, online PECOS lets you enter most enrollment updates or new enrollment information electronically, but you must still sign and mail paper forms as part of the process.

 Does greater volume of utilization impact denial rates for imaging services, or does the actual value of the Medicare payment have a greater effect? These charts sort 10 imaging services by their 2011 fee schedule charge, from lowest to highest value, and show the denial and utilization rates in 2007 and 2009.